Tuesday, July 20, 2010

New Books Piece: Rabid Child by Pete Risley

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Available from New Pulp Press http://www.newpulppress.com/titles/rabid_child/

From Pete Risley:

*Rabid Child* was written over a number of years, and repeatedly set asidefor long periods of time in favor of (somewhat) less unpleasant fictionprojects of mine. My unease over *Rabid Child* has been mostly because ofthe nature of the main character, a young man named Desmond Cray. Desmond,to put it mildly, is less than cuddly. You'll have to read the book to seewhat I mean. I invented Desmond, but somehow he developed in a way thatdisturbed me.

In fact, it's Desmond's unsavory qualities that make *Rabid Child* a goodfit for New Pulp Press. From the NPP website: *"Veering away from theassumption that a protagonist must be a sympathetic character, our books arecentered around con-men, losers, and sociopaths." *

The final, published version of *Rabid Child* is written in third person,and told entirely from Desmond's point of view. But at times, in the courseof writing the thing, I got so creeped out by Desmond that I kept trying tofind different ways to 'get some distance' on him. For instance, I found Iwas inclined as I wrote to step away from his viewpoint to make what areknown as 'authorial comments' about him, a no-no in the eyes of many readers(and editors) today. As an alternative to that, I considered having somechapters of the story told from the viewpoints of secondary characters.However, I judged after some efforts along this line that it wasn't going towork. I was stuck with Desmond. And he does get 'sticky' in more senses thanone.

As for crime-fiction influences, I read some Mickey Spillane novels when Iwas a kid in the early '70's, around the same time I was reading, say,Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut and whatever else caught my fancy. Ibelieve the first Spillane I read was actually *Day of the Guns*, not a MikeHammer novel, but a spy thriller featuring Tiger Mann. I enjoyed thisand the other '60's - early '70's Spillane stuff I read (including *The BodyLovers, The Twisted Thing, Survival - Zero! *and* The Erection Set*) thoughI had a notion that I shouldn't, and was inclined to tell girls in grannyglasses whom I wished to impress that I liked, umm, Brautigan and Vonnegut.

A bit later, I read Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, anddiscovered that I not only preferred them to Spillane, I tended to get moreengaged with their work than with some other types of fiction I sampled,like say, the novels of John Barth and John Updike.

Then in the early '80's, I read the critical study *Hardboiled America* byGeoffrey O'Brien, and became very intrigued with the whole idea oftough paperback original writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, CornellWoolrich, Charles Williams, and all those guys. I scarfed up an early '80'sreprint of Thompson's *The Killer Inside Me*, and soon was smitten withthat. When I learned that a company in the UK called Zomba Books was puttingout a line of reprints of works by some of these American writers, titled'Black Box Thrillers.' I went to some trouble to acquire copies through themail from a bookstore in NYC (I live in Columbus, Ohio.) Shortly after,Black Lizard started publishing reprints of swell titles as well, someby writers I hadn't heard of before. After awhile, crime fiction of thissort became my favorite stuff, and I decided I wanted to try and write someof it myself.

All these years later, *Rabid Child* is the first-published result of myenthusiasm and my efforts. It's definitely unfair to reach 'way back andblame it all on Mickey Spillane, but one thing I've learned from crimefiction is that dead guys make excellent scapegoats. So, if anyone puts meon the spot and asks how I could write about a character so horrid as thisDesmond Cray, I'll just reply *"It was easy."*

Hey Deb, thanks for asking. I wrote the novel, such as it is (actually, I like it, but frankly it's a little raw. It's my first novel.) I got the title from an old song by They Might Be Giants, off their first album. At the time, I was trying to think of a variant on 'wild child' for a title. The 'rabid child' could be any or all of three characters in the story. - pete r.